Wrapping up the inaugural book club meeting

In the last few weeks I've been far more interested in reading than in writing. (There has also been a fair amount of misc. drama and way too many hours at work in front of the computer.) So instead of a standard analysis of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and our first book club meeting, I will just share some passages from the book.

I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. I could use it to run, push buttons of one sort or another, make things happen. There were limits, but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me.
Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am.

I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name, remind msyelf of what I once could do, how others saw me.
I want to steal something.

The other two I had marked are too long to retype. But they are about how it all started, with political assassination blamed on Islamic fundamentalism. And about the loss of memory for young girls, who have no idea of a world before this, where they were more than their fertility. And yet, the societal ills of the world before did exist. It wasn't perfect then either; that much is true.

I loved talking with the rest of the group; what was interesting and important to them overlapped and differed in such wonderful ways. In particular the other readers paid more attention to the minor female characters, whereas I got caught up in the central narrative, and then the ways that history is told and retold.

And next month, Haruki Murakami...